Newly-elected mayor Ed Lee wants to eliminate homelessness in San Francisco, and he says the magic number to do it is three million — dollars, that is. $500,000 of those dollars come from a Dave Matthews Band fundraising concert in 2005…

65% of California adults support Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to raise sales and income taxes on people that earn over $250,000 a year…

Almost one third of San Franciscans have dogs, but dog walkers say they’re under fire: San Francisco officials are proposing special permits for walking two or more dogs. To qualify for the $250 permit, walkers must pass a course in canine etiquette and first aid…

In Occupy news, protesters succeeded Monday night in shutting down operations at the Port of Oakland for the second time in less than two months…

In West Sacramento, 100 truckers gathered to protest the Occupy protesters. Trucking company Devine Intermodal gave disgruntled workers the day off and served an on-site breakfast …

The city of San Jose has told several Occupiers their charges will be dropped if they don’t camp for two years. So far, three occupiers have promised not to occupy again.

California is facing a $13 billion budget shortfall over the next year and a half, and it’s safe to say that the pain will be felt across public services. In some parts of the Bay Area, incoming tax dollars won’t be enough to buy even books for libraries. That’s why, in places like Santa Clarita, libraries are going private. It’s a proven practice: The Mechanic’s Institute in San Francisco’s library has been private since the late 19th century.

What’s to be done when the economy makes books unaffordable, but public libraries can’t fill their shelves? KALW’s Holly J. McDede found a fairly simple answer: Start your own library.

* * *

HOLLY MCDEDE: To get to Kristina Kearns’ library you’ll have to first walk through an antiques shop on Valencia, called Viracocha. You’ll pass old-fashioned typewriters, a few bathtubs, subway station turnstiles, and an assortment of bicycles displayed on the walls. If it’s a Saturday there might also be a live piano player. Once you make it through this jungle of delightful oddities, you’ll run into Kristina Kearns. Chances are she’ll be sitting on a bench reading a book from the library she started.

Kearns’ library doesn’t feel much like a regular library either. The floors are a bit squeakier, and every once in awhile the building, like antique buildings tend to do, stretches. You might not notice it – that is, until Leaves of Grass falls off the shelf.

KRISTINA KEARNS: Oh! Walt Whitman just went down.

Kearns used to work at a bookstore in Greece that really struggled because of the poor economy. When she came back to America, she saw the same thing.

KEARNS: I had been with McSweeney’s Publishing, kind of volunteering for a while before then and helping out with the Rumpus, so it was strange to hear how publishing was dead and books are dead. Over and over again, it was kind of like, “Why are you guys saying this? You should be the ones not saying that!” I think it’s strange.

Kearns also had economic troubles of her own. She found it difficult to afford books, even used ones. She worked five part-time jobs for six months before she could even start buying books – not that she had any time to read the books once she had them. And her small, personal purchases certainly didn’t solve the larger problem going on here.

One day, she struck up a conversation with Jonathan Siegel, the owner of Viracocha, and pitched him the idea of opening a library of her own. It turned out she was talking to the right person. Siegel immediately offered her the space in the back of his antique shop.

KEARNS: His openness to just give me the chance, and his friends who came in and helped me build because I didn’t know what I was doing… that’s kind of, hopefully, what the name represents. All my job is is to keep this physical space open so that people can have this space to do what they want with it.

She called the library “Ourshelves” and set about looking for books. Before long, she had local authors on board. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon personally invited Kearns into his house, and told her to take whatever books she wanted. She went back to her library with 100 of Chabon’s books. Friends of San Francisco Public Library let her exchange books she already had for books she wanted from them.

KEARNS: I think part of it is that it’s not a commercial enterprise. This isn’t about money. This isn’t about stature of any kind. This is just an open space to do whatever you’d like.

Once her doors opened, Kearns started to hear about more libraries sprouting up throughout the Bay Area. In Richmond, a mother put bookshelves filled with children’s books in laundromats. In San Jose, volunteers started an informal lending program when the city failed to provide funds to hire a librarian. Within restaurant Mission Local Eatery lies a cookbook library.

KEARNS: It makes sense to me that the idea is coming out at the same time because books are expensive, and there’s a need to adapt the role of what a bookshop’s role is. When we’re put in a tighter corner, more ideas come out, more sparks and changes.

You know what other year was exciting for libraries? Are you thinking 1854? Because if you are, you’re right. For starters, the economic situation that year makes our current economy seem, eh, not that bad.

Back then, half of San Francisco’s population was unemployed. The gold had run out. So it was time to get creative. A small group of people founded the Mechanics’ Institute Library as a center for adult to learn crafts and trades. It still stands today in San Francisco’s Financial District.

TARYN EDWARDS: MY name is Taryn Edwards, and I’m one of the six librarians that we have on staff here.

To get a sense of what the Mechanics’ Institute Library looks like, first picture Kristina Kearns’ little library in the back of the antique shop. Now, take away the antique shop. Then, add a few floors. Put in an elevator, and a winding staircase. Don’t forget the glass windows.

EDWARDS: A mere five years after it opened, it was immediately too small, so that’s why we had to add two extra floors. And that’s why it’s a bit of a rabbit warren to get down to the next staircase. So it’s usually very quiet here up on the third floor.

It also sounds a lot different than Ourshelves. Ourshelves has a piano player for example while the Mechanics’ Institute has a chess club.

EDWARDS: Chess was always a main aspect of the Mechanic’s Institute, oddly enough, because in Gold Rush California there wasn’t a whole lot of entertainment options in San Francisco that didn’t involve getting drunk or carousing on the Barbary Coast. So our founders, being very moral men, wanted to offer the entertainment option of playing chess.

One thing both Ourshelves and the Mechanics’ Institute have in common that patrons pay for membership. At Ourshelves, the fee can be $120-$240 a year, based on a sliding scale. At Mechanics’ Institute, membership costs $95 a year. For that price, you could buy about six books at a bookstore. Here, take as many books as you want. Just, please, bring them back.

In San Francisco, I’m Holly McDede for Crosscurrents.

How important is your local public library to you? We want to know – visit us on our Facebook page.

Long before Beyonce decided to redefine “diva” for pop culture, the term was associated with high culture. Nevertheless, divas of then and now have maintained a reputation, as late comedian Anna Russell explains, “…you would need to be a glorio… …

Technology has done great things for medicine: Machines can help keep hearts beating and lungs breathing. Electronic medical records help doctors keep track of their patients’ treatment and prevent mistakes. But all that technology needs a lot of monitoring – and that can be frustrating for nurses who want to be tending people, not machines.

To combat this problem, healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente is implementing a new program to help nurses relax a bit, and shift their focus back to what’s really important. KALW’S Christopher Connelly has more on what they’re doing.

PERIASAMY: Breathe out despair or pain. The pain you have been holding on, just let it go.

Okay, you can open your eyes now. The woman you’re listening to is Banu Periasamy. She’s the afternoon managing nurse at Kaiser’s Richmond Medical Center. She works on the medical surgical floor. And she leads her staff in this centering exercise every day at the beginning of their shift. The whole thing lasts about three minutes.

On the other side of the Richmond Hills, at Kaiser’s Antioch hospital, the sound of wind chimes plays throughout the hospital three times a day.

Nurses, aides, managers, and even some doctors stop for 30 seconds as the bells twinkle through the halls. Some close their eyes, take a deep breath, and use those few moments to clear their minds.

Over In Vacaville, they work on techniques they call “heart math” to reduce stress in the moment.

In San Jose, nurses spend about an hour a week in a journaling club.

And in Santa Rosa, they channel alternative healing energies using Reiki and Gin Shin Jyutsu.

The programs are all part of Kaiser’s Caring Sciences program, a new initiative in 21 Northern California facilities. It’s based on what’s called the theory of human caring, a nursing theory that’s actually been around since the ’70s.

Anne Foss-Durant, who oversees Kaiser’s program, says it basically comes down to relationships.

ANNE FOSS-DURANT: Relationships with the patient and family. Relationships with our healthcare team and our healthcare members. Relationships with the community. And most importantly relationships with ourselves. Because we have to be in a good place in order to provide care to others.

It’s not always easy for nurses to stay in that “good place.” Nursing is, by its nature, a pretty stressful job.

Six years ago, Foss-Durant started thinking about ways to relieve that stress. She was the clinical adult services director at Kaiser’s Vallejo hospital, and every day, she could see how stressed her nurses were.

FOSS-DURANT: They were anxious before they got their assignment. And then they’d go out to take this assignment and they would be just so overwhelmed that there was this sense that they just couldn’t do it.

She worried that this anxiety was affecting patients. After all, talking with those stressed out nurses was often their main interaction with the hospital.

FOSS-DURANT: The age-old, I guess, saying, is that anxiety begets anxiety. And anxiety’s contagious. It’s not anything verbal, it’s not anything we can touch or feel, but we can sense that. And as healthcare providers as we walk in the room with that state, our patients sense it as well.

So she started looking for something to make a change. She thought back to a theory class she took in nursing school, and remembered something called the theory of human caring. She thought it could help her nurses put their work into perspective.

FOSS-DURANT: This is really an invitation to go back to the way we were taught to practice. And it’s a way to refocus what you do and begin to make sense of all the tasks that we’ve been given.

Foss-Durant said the changes at Vallejo had an almost immediate effect – to the point that when Kaiser built a new medical center in Antioch, the human caring theory guided everything from staff policies to the design of the actual building. It’s a decision Erica Drongowski, the hospital’s chief nursing officer, says has improved the hospital experience for staff and patients.

DRONGOWSKI: Although this is our day-to-day work environment, this is a strange and scary space for them.

Kaiser designed the hospital to minimize the fear factor. The building’s hallways form intersecting triangles that cut down on noise and avoid having centralized crowded nursing stations. Patients get individual rooms. There aren’t set visiting hours, so family members can visit whenever they want, and the rooms have full couches if a patient’s loved one wants to stay the night. They’ll even provide toothpaste and a toothbrush, if you ask them for it.

DRONGOWSKI: This is our patients’ environment and they invite us in. The patient’s care isn’t just dictated to them anymore. They’re part of it.

This is also the hospital where they play the chimes. Drongowski says she loves hearing them.

DRONGOWSKI: The busy-ness and stress contribute to medical errors. It contributes to us not being authentically present to the patient that we’re caring for, so the chimes gets us to relax, pause, center.

Kaiser is measuring the program’s success in a few ways: patient satisfaction, staff satisfaction, and workplace injuries. Down the road, they’re also looking to see if people heal more quickly, and if there are fewer medical errors. So far, the Antioch hospital has consistently out-performed other Kaiser hospitals in the region. Again, Anne Foss-Durant.

FOSS-DURANT: Patient satisfaction was the highest in the region and maintained the high levels over two-and-a-half years. So, over time it became obvious that it wasn’t just the new building.

Convinced that using the caring theory made a difference, last year Kaiser expanded the program to include nurses across the entire Northern California hospital system. More than 2,000 Kaiser nurses have taken part in some kind of Caring Science training. Many of them went back to start projects at their own hospitals. One of those nurses was Banu Periasamy – you remember her, from our breathing exercise.

PERIASAMY: The nurses are frustrated and the nurses are yelling at each other. We have patients, we forget that there are patients that are very sick. They need to heal, they need to rest. They’re all task-oriented – they forget the patient in the chaotic environment. So I thought I need to bring the change with my staff. Then my patients’ experience is going to be excellent.

Kaiser is not the first to use the theory of human caring in their hospitals: Medical centers in Texas, North Carolina, and Massachusetts all incorporate similar ideas. But Kaiser may be the first to do so on such a large scale.

And before you make up your mind about these ideas, you might consider taking a moment to breathe.

For Crosscurrents, I’m Christopher Connelly.

Christopher Connelly is a reporter with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Over the past decade, California has resettled more Middle Eastern refugees than any other state in the country. In Northern California, Santa Clara County in the South Bay is a resettlement hub for Middle Eastern refugees – more than 1,300 moved there since 2006. About one out of three of those refugees are from Iraq. And most have seen or suffered through violence related to the war.

JASMINE: What happened will remain like a scar inside yourself. Especially like we saw a lot of stuff not normal. Like dead people in the street. People killed in front of your eye. I don’t believe like I’m going to forget them.

Iraqi refugee Jasmine asked that we not use her full name for this story. After two years in the U.S., she’s been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and she’s receiving therapy for it. But Iraqi culture, like many others, often considers mental health problems shameful, and Jasmine is concerned about embarrassing her family. Reporter Shuka Kalantari shares Jasmine’s story.

* * *

SHUKA KALANTARI: Twenty-four year old Jasmine is sitting in a San Jose community center, watching a video on her laptop of a roomful of people dancing. She’s an engineering student, and that night she had introduced her college classmates to a traditional Iraqi dance called Chobi.

JASMINE: It was like ethnic night on campus. So we got like our foods. We got baklava, konafa, Arabic coffee, and Iraqi tea with cardamom.

Jasmine misses her home. She misses her culture. But as a refugee displaced by war, she can’t go back. She says she’s enjoying the safety she and her family have found in their new home in California. But finding happiness has proven to be more difficult.

JASMINE: You left your home. You left the place that you belong to. Your people who loved there … Sometimes I feel like everything for me after Iraq is different, the roads, the air, the dust. I know back home. The dust of back home. I know the air of back home.

Before she fled Iraq, Jasmine was studying computer science at Baghdad University. She left after insurgents killed her father.

JASMINE: He was walking with a couple of his friends. There’s a car stopped. There is three armed people inside it. He called my father name and he give him seven shots. Four in his chest and three in his head.

Soon after her father’s death, some classmates warned her that strange men were looking for her. Frightened of being kidnapped and held for ransom, she fled and never returned to the campus.

JASMINE: Because at that time, when my father like killed, my other friend her father got kidnapped. And they didn’t receive body. They don’t have right now like any kind of knowledge if he’s alive or dead or what … so I can’t say I’m unique. I’m something common in Iraq, unfortunately.

Within four months of her father’s murder, Jasmine’s family escaped to Syria. Two years later, they were granted asylum and moved to San Jose. She says her family was in survival mode in Iraq and experienced a delayed reaction to the stress of war.

JASMINE: And after a while like you notice your huge loss. Like the country and the house and the father. I have like grave issues because when my father got killed I couldn’t say goodbye to him.

Once she landed in America, depression hit Jasmine hard.

JASMINE: It was my dream to be a teacher in Baghdad University. Right now I believe it’s so far – I can’t reach to be a teacher at Baghdad University. You start being so far from your dreams back home. Like right now I feel like not only am I start at zero, but before zero, because people don’t trust my education.

Jasmine’s social worker recommended she see a therapist and referred her to the Center for Survivors of Torture. Doctor James Livingston is a psychologist at the center. He says just the experience of having to flee your home country is usually enough to cause post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

JAMES LIVINGSTON: The re-experiencing symptoms are very painful and disruptive because they’re typically accompanied by the kinds of feelings that were experienced in the original situation. And so terror, horror, all sorts of very painful emotions…

Jasmine remembers one of those flashbacks. She was at a women’s studies class at her college in San Jose. They were watching a documentary about a war in Chile. After the film, the teacher asked students to try to imagine how their lives would be if they lived in war.

JASMINE: So she tried like to make the student feel the feelings of these people. So she start like direct her hand for the students in the class and say, “Imagine if you lost your husband?” And she came to me, “You imagine that they tried to kidnap you.”

Jasmine didn’t have to imagine.

JASMINE: I felt like I’m out of air. I left the class and I remained outside like for over like 20 hours just crying in a wail.

For the next two days her mind was flooded with bad memories. She says even seemingly unrelated things would trigger her symptoms.

JASMINE: Sometimes like part of songs make me like really sad, and depression. Like when something happen with me I feel like I’m out of the world for a couple of days.

Jasmine says she also has the extra burden of constantly worrying about her friends and family back in Baghdad.

JASMINE: I feel like, kind of like guilty. I’m sitting here. A normal day. And there is people here still suffering back home. Facing the same problems that I faced.

Dr. Livingston, the therapist at Centers for Survivors of Torture, says this burden has real effects. It can be hard for people with PTSD to focus their attention long enough to be able to do new things, or move forward with their lives.

LIVINGSTON: We get people who were professionals in their home countries who are very intelligent and very educated and find themselves unable to learn because they’re traumatized.

Jasmine says she can’t forget her past, but she is learning how deal with it.

JASMINE: Especially like when I’m over-thinking I go to crochet. The stitch that took for me like normal times 10 minutes, when I’m like in a certain situation, wow! In two minutes I did this.

Many Middle Eastern refugees are Iraqis who have fled war-related violence. But in the past decade, the largest number of refugees have actually come from Iran.

More than 15,000 Iranians have moved to California just since 2006. Though their country isn’t currently at war, many Iranians suffer religious and political persecution. And they face many of the same social and cultural taboos about seeking mental healthcare as Iraqi refugees.

Reporter Shuka Kalantari tells us how one woman has overcome those barriers – and how others might do the same.

* * *

SHUKA KALANTARI: Azin Izadifar is a 45-year-old Iranian refugee living alone in a small studio apartment in San Jose. Izadifar has shoulder-length black hair with a few grey streaks, that she keeps tied in bun. When she opens the door, she’s smiling. Izadifar came to the U.S. in 2009, seeking asylum. She says that’s the first time she ever saw a psychologist, though there were signs she might have needed to earlier.

AZIN IZADIFAR: When I was in Iran and even up to probably a year ago, at a certain time during the night I would wake up. I would wake up shouting, like having nightmares. I always, always had this problem.

Izadifar spent the ages of 16 to 19 in Iran’s infamous Evin Prison. She knew she carried the memories of that time with her, but it wasn’t until she came to the U.S. that she realized she had been living with PTSD for nearly three decades.

IZADIFAR: It had become so normal for me that I couldn’t even understand that there was a problem there – I had a sleep disorder. And it could be related to the trauma I had in prison. Then I realize, “Okay, that’s a sign of PTSD.”

Izadifar wouldn’t have always used the term PTSD – it’s not as common in Iranian culture. Doctor Loren Krane is a psychologist working with refugees. He says refugees like Izadifar often don’t seek therapy because of deep cultural taboos.

LOREN KRANE: In most other countries, people associate psychologists and psychiatrists with really severe mental illness.

Krane says some cultures don’t see conditions like depression as a chronic disease – it’s more like a temporary problem.

KRANE: And for problems in living, they might go to a respected family member. They might go to, in some cases an imam or religious leader. In other cases they might go to a medical doctor.

It’s hard for many to accept the idea that mental health problems may require specialized treatment. Refugee Azin Izadifar says many who do get therapy often keep it a secret from their community.

IZADIFAR: We are not very much open-minded when it comes to mental health issues, but there’s a tendency in our culture to underestimate that, and say “Okay, that was passed. Now we are in a free society. We have to live our lives. We have to get a job and buy a car and just be normal.”

It’s taken a long time to realize, but her past experiences remain very much in the present. She was a young teenager after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Like many of her peers, she participated in secret meetings and demonstrations against the country’s new Islamic government, but before long, she was arrested. She still remembers her first few weeks in the prison, while she waited to be interrogated.

IZADIFAR: I was sitting there behind that door and waiting for my turn and just hearing people screaming, shouting, crying, begging not to be tortured and stuff like that.

Izadifar was eventually placed in a small cell, along with dozens of other female prisoners. She says sometimes the room was so crowded they would have to take turns sleeping at night, because there wasn’t enough space for all of them to lie down at the same time.

She says even though she never had a moment alone, prison life kept her completely isolated. She says the more people knew about each other, the more likely they’d be tortured for that information. She still remembers one time when someone did speak.

IZADIFAR: It was a rainy day and another cellmate of mine, she was 17, I was almost the same age. It was just us walking, and we were all wet, and I don’t know why, she started telling her whole life, her whole life story. How she was brought up, how many sister and brothers she had, how she was involved in this political group. And then our time was up and we had to come back, so we came back to the room and they called her. And they took her, and they executed her. So the next morning I woke up with gunshots, hearing these voices. And I clearly remember that I opened my eyes, I told myself, “No. She is not executed. She is living somewhere. It’s not happening.” And I just go back to sleep.

After that day, Izadifar stopped talking to her cellmates. She was released two years later, and more or less went on with her life. She married and moved to Austria, where she began working on Iranian human rights campaigns for Amnesty International. But when her marriage ended, she realized she couldn’t survive alone in Austria, and she couldn’t go back to Iran. She decided to seek asylum in California. It wasn’t an easy decision.

IZADIFAR: Although I didn’t have any other choices, but you know, if you get asylum you cannot go back to your own country. You cannot see your family. You cannot see your friends. It’s not an easy decision.

As part of the refugee process, once she arrived in the U.S., Izadifar had to visit an immigration lawyer and prove why she couldn’t return to Iran. But every time she tried to talk to her lawyer about her time in prison, she would start crying.

IZADIFAR: I wanted to start and tell her my case, and I couldn’t. I had an appointment for 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and all that time I was crying. I couldn’t finish a sentence. And she said, “You know you have to go for therapy. This is urgent for you. This is what you need.”

On the advice of her lawyer, Izadifar began to get counseling at the Center for Survivors of Torture in San Jose, also known as CST. Izadifar says she sees many of her same symptoms in other Iranian refugees.

IZADIFAR: I can clearly see that how the traumas that this refugees, this asylees, have gone through is still affecting them.

Not everyone in Izadifar’s position seeks therapy. Doctor Loren Krane says many people fear being judged.

KRANE: As having something wrong with them. Even though I think all members of their community would be sympathetic because they’re struggling with the same issues and having many of the same symptoms.

Krane has been working with refugees for over two decades. He started out taking a traditional Western approach to treating them.

KRANE: What are you here for? What are your presenting symptoms? When did these symptoms start? Have you had prior psychiatric history?

But he says he quickly realized that this wouldn’t work. So instead, he frames the questions to focus on quality of life issues, like how they’re doing finding housing, or work.

KRANE: In the course of our conversations naturally they will tell me about the difficulties that they’re having which are often related to their symptoms of depression and PTSD. But I’m not framing it as a psychological evaluation. So they’re much more willing to talk with me about what their experience is here.

Another big barrier to mental health care is access. Refugees with minors in their families get five years of free services, including health care, but refugees without kids only qualify for eight months of services. So, in less than a year, they need to find a job, a home, and learn English – all while possibly dealing with symptoms of PTSD.

SALLY SHARROCK: Practical and psychological support often works best when working with the refugee populations.

Sally Sharrock is a therapist at CST. She says only after addressing their basic needs can refugees even begin to think about mental health. But it’s not always easy to get them into the office. So sometimes, Sharrock goes to them. Inside a small waiting room at the Lenzen Health Clinic, a handful of refugees are waiting to see a therapist. Sharrock and others provide free sessions here.

SHARROCK: So this is where the patients come after they met with the medical doctors and had a physical exam.

Down the hall from the waiting room, Sharrock is standing in a small exam room sparsely decorated with a world map.

SHARROCK: They’re familiar with this setting, which is what makes it a lot easier for them to meet with a therapist here. It breaks down a lot of the stigma, obstacles and barriers.

Sharrock says she spends a long time gaining the trust of her refugee clients.

SHARROCK: Building rapport is kind of like the first step towards engaging them in any conversations about mental health.

CST uses other unique methods to reach out to Middle Eastern refugees, like hosting potlucks and educational seminars. To make that approach work, they rely on refugees like Azin Izadifar. She’s now doing outreach to other Iranian refugees in the San Jose area. She goes to Iranian cultural events and hands out Farsi-language pamphlets about the free therapy at CST. She also hosts events on nutrition in the U.S., education, and other topics of practical value. Izadifar says reaching out to other refugees helps her deal with her own past trauma.

IZADIFAR: The wound will always be there, but there’s a difference between a wound that has not healed, that has not been exposed to the sun, to a wound that’s been healed and now you see a scar, you know? It’s different. The wound will be there, but you’re not as sensitive, it’s not as painful.

She’s also using writing as an outlet – right now, she’s working on her memoir. She says those stories aren’t hard to remember.

IZADIFAR: A part of especially people who have been in prison, a part of us is still in the prison. Even if you are living in a beautiful land like California, a big part of your being can still be in that prison.

After being released from Iran’s prison, it took Izadifar almost 30 years to make it to California. But in some ways, she’s only now leaving.

The Bay Area’s first real freeway was the 880. Completed in 1957, it connects the Port of Oakland with San Jose. Today it’s a major trucking route, and the most direct way to get to the Oakland Airport, or to a Raiders game.

But those things aren’t what set it apart from other freeways. Of all the Bay Area’s roads, the 880 — also called the Nimitz freeway — is arguably the one that gets the most people the most worked up.

AAA once named the “Nasty Nimitz” the “rudest road” in the Bay Area. And as far as we can tell, it’s the only highway with Yelp reviews, which say things like, “880 is like the backwards bigotted (sic) relative in the family that everyone is ashamed of.” And, “Dammit 880, why can’t you be nicer and more manicured like your East Bay cousins 80 and 580? And, “There is a stretch around Downtown Oakland that is sooo freakin’ bumpy it’s like ridin’ in a horse-drawn buggy down the Oregon Trail. You have died from dysentery.”

Why so much distaste for one stretch of pavement? Julie Caine set out to learn the real story of one of Oakland’s most maligned roads.

* * *

JULIE CAINE: Start driving on any freeway in the Central Bay Area, and you’ll soon find yourself in a maze of 80s: the 280, the 380, the 580, the 680, the 980, the plain old 80. And then … there’s the 880.

CECILLE ISIDRO: It feels like Frogger. You know?

RON LIGHT: I’m scared to death. I feel hemmed in.

ROSALINDA MONTEZ PALACIOS: Everybody is literally locked in like a puzzle.

LIGHT: It feels like there’s a big rig always on either side of you.

PALACIOS: Because they don’t want to slow down for you to let you in to that lane or whatever you want to get into.

WHITFIELD MCTAIR: That lane, for the past five years as always been, just like, ba doom ba doom ba doom.

Cecille Isidro, Ron Light, Rosalinda Montez Palacios, and Whitfield McTair are four of the 220,000 people who drive the 880 every day. And they all agree that there’s something uniquely terrible about it – some perfect storm of traffic and design that doesn’t affect any other freeway. Here are a few things you should know about the road.

It’s the only freeway route between Oakland and San Jose that semi trucks can use. Part of it collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and since then, seismic retrofitting and construction have been pretty much ongoing. Which brings us back to Cecille Isidro.

ISIDRO: I mean, like, I don’t want to blame the shortcomings of my personal life on a stretch of freeway.

She lives in Alameda and works in Oakland’s Fruitvale district, about a mile away. She used to live in San Francisco. She moved to avoid the 880.

ISIDRO: My relationship with the 880 has reached that point where it’s like, you know, why I stayed home that night? Because I didn’t want to get on the 880.

The idea of the 880 as a freeway you have a personal relationship with – for better or for worse – came up a lot in my interviews. A truck driver named Gary Fawcett described it as…

GARY FAWCETT: That hairy, smelly uncle with the stinky cigars.

The consensus opinion got me wondering – how did the 880 get to be the way it is? And could anything change it for the better? Fawcett might not believe this, but there’s actually somebody who’s job it is to groom that hairy, smelly uncle. His name is Scott McCrank, and he manages traffic and construction on the 880 for Caltrans.

SCOTT MCCRANK: They had this position created so I can help manage the mess, let’s say.

As we talk, McCrank is taking me on a tour of the section of 880 between downtown Oakland and Hayward. Right now, there are seven different construction projects on this 15-mile stretch. Hence the bumpy roads, the short merges, the unmarked lanes, the lack of shoulders, and all those white knuckle rides.

I ask McCrank to explain some of what drivers experience when they travel on the road. I thought about it the way I’d consider a family member. Maybe if we knew more about what’s behind the dysfunction, we could learn to love the 880.

First question: when we drive past downtown Oakland, what are those little ridges in some of the lanes that make the ride so turbulent?

MCCRANK: That’s because we have replaced the concrete panels, but we haven’t done the grinding yet. There’s a little bit of undulation, so sometimes when you’re driving it, you feel like it’s, kind of, not really like a roller coaster, but it kind of goes up and down a little bit. Your steering kind of bumps up and down.

We keep driving, crossing over 5th Avenue. I notice that the lanes really do feel especially narrow. Are they?

MCCRANK: A typical lane would be 12-feet wide. But when you’re driving in a construction zone, and we don’t have all the usable width just yet, we do narrow the lanes down to 11-foot lanes. And so you’ll notice it. It may not seem like much, but it’s a foot across all the lanes.

Is that safe?

MCCRANK: To do some of the work that we need to do, with keeping full lanes open, we’d probably have to reduce the amount of lanes. So instead of having four lanes, we’d have to eliminate one all together and we’d probably be causing a huge backup. So it’s kind of one of the trade-offs that you have.

But there’s not even a shoulder in some places. What if you break down or if there’s an accident?

MCCRANK: If you’re stuck in an area where there’s no shoulder, just get as far to the right as you can, turn your flashers on and stay inside the vehicle is the best advice we have.

In case you’re wondering, the lanes aren’t going to be shoulder-less forever. There are places where they’ve built one in. But in other spots, there’s only so far they can go.

The brick building he’s referring to is one of several near the 23rd Avenue exit. They mark the spot where freeway construction cut directly through the middle of the now defunct California Cotton Mills, back in the 1950s. It’s a historic site – so, the 880’s probably not getting any wider.

Now that I’d learned so much about the 880, I wanted to experience it on its own terms.

CAINE: I’m just getting on the 880. It’s rush hour, and it’s raining. And I wanted to get on the road and just see if I could make my peace with it. I was thinking about the 880 as this, you know, crotchety old uncle that you’re going to have to sit down with at the Thanksgiving table, whether you like it or not. And, how do you reconcile with that?

You know, the 880 is a feature of our lives, and it kind of makes us who we are. Sort of like those family members who, you know, you just have to learn to love ‘em. I guess the thing I have to say is 880, where would I be without you?

As we watch social unrest spread around the Bay Area, we remember San Francisco in the 1960s. It was a melting pot of ideas, in politics, lifestyle choices, and in music.

This was especially true for Latin musicians. It was a mix of rhythms and styles coming together … a whole generation of artists drew upon that energy.

JOHN SANTOS: We were arrested in Dolores Park, for playing. Because, supposedly, we were breaking the law, playing over the decibel limit of a statute in the city of San Francisco.

Local musician John Santos is just one of the artists featured in an exhibit at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library called “American Sabor.” In Spanish, “sabor” means “flavor,” and it equally describes good food as it does good music. The exhibit, which traveled here from the Smithsonian Institution, highlights artists ranging from Joan Baez and Santana to Ruben Blades and Selena – all American artists who have tapped into their Latin roots to influence popular music across the U.S.

KALW’s Steven Short recently stopped, looked and listened to the exhibit. He picks up the story from here.

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STEVEN SHORT: Before Carlos Santana was “Santana”, he explored the spicy musical stew called “Latin music” to create his own electrifying sound.

CARLOS SANTANA: See, I used to go to picnics in San Jose even before that, and there’d be, like, three bands. There’d be Latin, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Afro-Cuban music like Cal Tjader, or Mongo Santamaria, or Lowen Malone. And there’d be mariachi music, and there’d be a blues band.

And so I would walk away, and I could hear all three of them at the same time. And I said, “That’s the sound that I want to get. I want to incorporate all of this music and make it all one.”

And, as the “American Sabor” exhibit shows, Santana is one in a long line of musicians blending Latin styles to perfect or create distinctly new American styles. For example, the dance orchestras of New York perfected mambo from Cuban roots. And mambo has no stylistic connection to the Tejano Country style of performers such as Freddie Fender – yet, both are clearly Latin-flavored.

San Francisco City Librarian Luis Herrera probably heard Freddie Fender as a boy in Texas in the ‘70s. But the Latin-influenced rock that stuck in his mind wasn’t from Texas. It was coming from the Bay Area.

LUIS HERRERA: Obviously I’m Latino, so I’m very proud of that, and the fact that the music is part of who we are as a people. And so growing up I listened to Malo, and Tower of Power, and all of those actually have ties to the Bay Area.

Librarian Herrera appreciates that this exhibit is bilingual, and that it features visual aspects of the scene.

HERRERA: For example album covers, photographs, covers from 1940s all the way to the present time.

But the important part is the music, which visitors can hear at listening stations. He also points out how appropriate it is for this show to be at the library, because libraries are about story telling.

HERRERA: And certainly music is one way – the oral tradition combined with the written word – is in fact about storytelling. So we’re thrilled about it, particularly the contribution that San Francisco made through Latin performers in American popular music.

There are five sections to the exhibit, one for each of the communities represented: San Antonio, New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. You’re likely to recognize names of performers in each section. And you’re just as likely to want to dance when you hear the music on the jukebox. Go ahead! This is one time you don’t have to be quiet at the library. It just adds to the flavor.

At the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library, I’m Steven Short for Crosscurrents.

This is the last weekend you can catch the “American Sabor” exhibit at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Buried Treasure is the Crosscurrents staff blog, showcasing our daily favorites: headlines, radio stories, internet errata, and anything else we come across and think is cool.

Usually something has to be very old before the Smithsonian Institution pays much attention to it. But not-so-old Bay Area music icon Carlos Santana – who can still fill an auditorium – is featured in a traveling exhibit organized by that venerable collector of Americana.

He’s included because of the impact that Latin sounds have on his sound. And Latin music is the focus of this exhibit, called “American Sabor.” (“Sabor” is Spanish for “flavor.”) Teen dance groups from around the Bay Area are gathering in San Francisco’s Main Library this weekend in connection with this national traveling exhibit.

“I used to go to picnics in San Jose,” says Santana, “and there’d be, like, three bands. Puerto Rican, Cuban, Afro-Cuban music … And there’d be mariachi music, and there’d be a blues band. And so I would walk away, and I could hear all of ‘em at the same time. And I said, “That’s the sound that I want to get. I want to incorporate all of this music and make it all one.”

Santana, the man, points out that Santana, the band, is multi-cultural, which makes it “all one,” too. After all, ain’t that America?

San Francisco is one of five cities featured in this interactive exhibit. It’s at the Main Library in San Francisco’s Civic Center, until November 13. And this Saturday, November 5, young dancers will perform in the Teen Latin Dance Showcase, starting at 2pm. Jesse “Chuy” Varela, KCSM 91.1 FM’s music director, will emcee the program.

Occupy Oakland has been making international headlines. Early yesterday morning police shut down the tent city that stood in front of Frank Ogawa Plaza for nearly two weeks. KALW’s criminal justice reporter Ali Winston reported from the plaza.

By late afternoon, as many as a thousand people responded by marching through the streets of Downtown Oakland. Just after dark, police from the City of Oakland and other agencies repeatedly used tear gas in an attempt to disperse the crowd. KALW’s Casey Miner was there.

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BEN TREFNY: Casey, give us a sense of what the crowd was like. Who was there?

CASEY MINER: The rally began in front of the main branch of the Oakland public library. It was conducted in the style of the general assemblies that govern the occupy movement – one person speaking, the people around him shouting back what he said so everyone could hear. There were several hundred people, not all of whom had been at the encampment. They were upset about what had happened, and also about the broader economic issues of the Occupy movement.

TREFNY: And did people see those two things as related?

MINER: They did – there was a feeling that the way the city responded to the camp was not only out of proportion to the problem, but that it was kind of a waste of money and energy that could be going to address these other issues. I spoke with one Oakland resident, Tommie Sexton, who came to the rally with his 16-month-old daughter.

TOMMIE SEXTON: I’m so angry. This city is falling apart. There’s no money here. They’re closing schools, they’re closing libraries. That they have the money to do this is outrageous.

TREFNY: Seventeen law enforcement agencies from San Jose to Solano County took part in the action, which was planned for several days. Now, Casey, things became very chaotic later in the night. You were there. What happened?

MINER: Pretty soon after the demonstrators started marching, maybe around 5:30, there was a scuffle at 8th and Washington – people threw paint on police, and a few arrests were made. From there demonstrators continued to march. One of the demonstrators – he called himself Z – – was one of a handful of people really loudly telling people to keep moving.

MINER: Yes, there were hundreds of people – definitely disrupting traffic – but really, very peaceful. Unlike earlier in the day, there were no police escorts, no officers anywhere that I could see. That went on for about an hour, as night fell. And it felt really positive, really like people were getting the space for discussion THAT they wanted. This young woman, Temika Gardener, actually came and found me.

TEMIKA GARDNER: Finally, I’m walking down the street with people and any one of them I know I have something in common with.

TREFNY: So Casey, it sounds like they were marching peacefully, for the most part. But things took a turn.

MINER: Yes, around 7:30, the marchers returned to 14th and Broadway, right in front of Frank Ogawa Plaza. And that’s where an officer started saying through a megaphone that they were going to use tear gas.

TREFNY: And then they did.

MINER: And then they did. They shot the first major rounds off around 7:45. That really changed the tone of the night. One of the protesters, a man named Scott Olson who’s a Marine Corps veteran and member of Veterans for Peace, was struck in the head with either a tear gas canister or a beanbag round. Right now, he’s in critical condition at Highland Hospital with skull fractures. He was not the only person wounded by less-lethal rounds: many were struck with beanbags, and one woman was knocked out cold with either tear gas or flash-bang grenades. The confrontations between demonstrators and police continued for several hours.

Occupy organizers have called for a general assembly meeting at 14th and Broadway at 6 tonight. Stay up to date by visiting our criminal justice blog, The Informant.